GRASS 5.4 Information and Features
General Information -
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Developers forum -
GRASScluster -
Credits -
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CVS repository
General information
[ About GRASS ]
There are now 3 GRASS branches:
- 5.4 (CVS repository "grass", branch "releasebranch_5_4").
- 5.5 (CVS repository "grass", HEAD).
- 6.x (CVS repository "grass6", HEAD and various release branches).
5.4 is the stable branch, from which the various 5.4.x releases are
derived. Future releases from this branch will contain only
bug-fixes or minor, backward-compatible improvements. 5.4.0
was released 5 November 2004. See See related web pages.
5.5 is the dead-end development version of 5.4. Only minor changes that
are not forward compatible with version 5.7 onwards go in here. Also, minor bugfixes
will typically go into 5.5 initially, then get merged back to the 5.4 branch later.
There are also some minor changes that are too intrusive to go into the 5.4.x
releases (e.g. because they break backwards compatibility, or
introduce additional dependencies). All new development takes place in 5.7+.
6.x is the active version which was previously referred to as
"5.1". See related web pages. Current
development effort is strongly focussed on this version.
For features details, please refer to the Roadmap.
Status of version:
GRASS 5.4.0: released 5 November 2004.
GRASS 5.4.1: released 26 July 2007.
What's new in current release of GRASS 5.4.x?
See Press release,
NEWS list, and
for details, please read the detailed changes HISTORY.
How stable is GRASS 5.4.x?
GRASS 5.4.x has been tested on Linux, MacOSX, WindowsNT/2000/XP and Silicon
Graphics Irix systems. It is recommended for daily production usage.
Large File Support
From 5.4.0 onwards GRASS supports reading and writing large files (> 2GB)
if it is possible in your operating system. If you compile with
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64, you should be able to have raster maps
which are larger than 2Gb.
GRASS 5.4 documents
Bug reports
- You are kindly requested to send your comments about GRASS 5 functionality
(recent version).
- List of known bugs
in this GRASS 5.4.x version (old bugtracker). Your help to fix these bugs is highly appreciated. If you find
a bug, please check the list if it is already known. If not, you are kindly
requested to report the bug(s) to use our new bug report form
Clustered GRASS GIS
GIS related work is regularly CPU-intensive - as CPU power becomes cheaper
nowadays, GRASS might be run in clustered environments. There are several
options to parallelize GRASS:
- openMOSIX: To run GRASS
on an openMOSIX cluster,
there is no need to modify GRASS or to link with any library, or even
to assign processes to different nodes. You can run GRASS in parallel
sessions (same location, different mapsets) which will be sent to the
various cluster nodes.
However, individual modules will be run serially on one CPU. So this is more
load-balancing than a real cluster. It should be quite easy to set up.
- Beowulf Cluster: Requires GRASS
modifications not done yet.
- GRASS 5 contains the "gmath" library which contains wrapper functions to
the numerical libraries LAPACK/BLAS which also exists in a
parallelized form PLAPACK and PBLAS and ScaLAPACK. However, further
work has to be done to utilize the LAPACK/BLAS functions within GRASS.
- Parallelized s.surf.idw (MPI)
Credits
GRASS Credits page (incomplete) - List of
GRASS
Development Team members
Download
Ok, ok. How can I get current GRASS 5.4.x?
Go to the download page and start downloading!
Some additional tidbits you may need...
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